Sally Hemings in Paris, 2025, part 1

 

I was in Paris a couple of weeks ago for a few days. Long story short, this was my third trip, we meant to be there longer, but other things intervened, so we only had one full day there before we had to move on. I had two things that I really wanted to see, and one was the location of the Hotel d'Langeac, where Sally and James Hemings lived while they were in Paris. That is, Thomas Jefferson's residence that also served as the de facto United States embassy as the French Revolution gained steam. 

The address is on the corner of the Champs Elysée and Rue de Berri, just as in the eighteen century. You can even get a sense of the size of the property by walking down Rue de Berri to Rue de Ponthieu, also there in the eighteenth century. The original house, outbuildings, and gardens were torn down long ago, but nineteenth-century building stands in its place contain a Zara and a We Work. 

Walking along the walls of the current building, I imagined the ghosts of Hotel d'Langeac rooms on the other side: the dining room, the servants' stairs, the gateway into the courtyard. I even went inside for just a moment, just to see. White and beige everywhere, like the ghosts of furniture covered while the occupants were away. There is a basement level. 

In the early twentieth century, University of Virginia students, all male and all White, had a plaque place on the corner of the building to note that this was the residence of Thomas Jefferson during years in Paris (he actually had another, two, in fact, but this was the most famous).

You can see it there between the tall, arched doorway and shorter, square doorway.

On closer inspection, however, you can see this:

Young women from Tuskegee University in Alabama, USA, have created and placed their own marker beneath the one to Jefferson. 

"Here lived Sally Hemings, witness to history and symbol of resilience."

They also added "I love Sally in Paris!" and "Women's History" with a happy emoji, and left Hemings a bouquet of flowers. As the young people say: they gave her her flowers, both figuratively and literally!

That teenager, trying to survive extraordinary circumstances to these women who love her for her "resilience." Such awesome beauty in that connection across time. 

Sister Sarah; or, what became of Sarah Bailey

On a sidequest of a sidequest of a sidequest, I discovered that Ancestry.com now has ship manifests of the New Orleans slave trade. Out of curiosity, I started tossing in names of people who I suspected had disappeared in that direction. Up popped "Sarah Bailey" in an 1845 manifest from Baltimore.

Douglass had a sister Sarah who disappeared from the record around 1832-ish. She was misidentified for a long time as Sarah O. Petit because Petit had addressed Douglass as "brother" in a letter decades later. Petit meant "brother" in either a larger, figurative sense, or in a fraternal order sense, but not a literal sense. When I researched Sarah O. Petit, years ago, her history indicated that she could not have been Sarah Bailey, daughter of Harriet Bailey and brother of Frederick Bailey who became Frederick Douglass.

The Sarah in this record comes from Baltimore and is four years older than Douglass's sister. Baltimore would have been the main port of exit, so that isn't any problem to believe. The age is another matter. Frederick wasn't sure about his own age and could date himself by events in Baltimore. He actually thought that he was a year older than his actual age for most of his life. Is a difference of four years believable for Sarah? Or would someone else have been estimating her age and got it wrong? After all, Anna Douglass's age fluctuated wildly in the census.

Hester Bailey below her could be the cousin Hester, but Aunt Hester was born in 1810 and the Hester in the manifest is fifteen years younger. That seems a stretch. -- Wait! There was a cousin Hester born around 1826! Perhaps that could be her?

In any case, this is an interesting coincidence.

The Probable Next Project; or, Going to Get My People (if I can figure out how)

 

Last fall I finally saw the National African-American History Museum of the Smithsonian. Quite a stellar collection and permanent exhibit (although we were disappointed that they had rotated out Nat Turner's Bible). You have a lot of feelings going through the building. Horror, joy, rage, shame -- at least, shame if you are White. At one point, a little Black girl, maybe six or eight (I can never determine children's ages), saw a mural using a historical etching depicting a slave auction. A white man pulled a baby from a crying mothers arms in the image. "Why is he doing that?" she asked her mother. 

That was a million pound weight.

Yet, that still had a distance. My skin had a culpability, but in historic terms. Then I came to this tiny book, the size of Beatrix Potter books, small to fit in a child's hands: Little Black Sambo. That exact book (if not artifact) lived in our house growing up, in my Maw-maw's house, too. The tigers running in circles and becoming butter, the shoes on the tigers' ears, the tiger holding the umbrella by his tale. When my brother was little, he had a version that had a larger book in a record sleeve so that he could read along as the story -- with songs --played along on the record player. There was even a Denny's style restaurant called Sambo's with a small gift shop selling dolls and postcards and storybooks. 

Time folded. Past and present slammed together. I suddenly felt deeply implicated. This bit of racism, depicting what was originally supposed to be a Desi boy as African then depicting the African boy in the worst stereotypes. This was all entertainment as a child. In fact, I desperately wanted those dolls for my collection. The casual, "of course," of wanting those dolls, of the record, of the book,  of no one ever stopping to consider that these images taught children like myself about other children with dark skin, that of course those children would buy it. 

If you read To Kill a Mockingbird, which I loved as a teenager, you might think that children are wise in their innocence and that, with wise adults, will be guided toward good. Mockingbird was a later draft. The first draft (not that the publishers wanted to frame it that ways, instead marketing it as a long-lost sequel") is more honest. Go Set a Watchman shows you Atticus Finch as a Klansman, Scout as a northern educated White girl returning home (in that southern novel cliche) to discover how much she has changed and that maybe Jim Crow ought to go, even if she thinks Civil Rights is an outsider movement going too fast, which was the way many nice White liberals actually thought then.

Many Southern readers felt betrayed. "No! No! MY Atticus wouldn't be a Klansman!" An Alabama small town attorney in the 1950s and 1960s? Yes, he would. maybe pull the beam from thine own eye.  This was us White people, even the well-meaning, nice White people. Watchman is not a good book, but it's a more honest book. Children read Little Black Sambo because it was considered "harmless." They seldom sat in the same classrooms as their Black peers, who were tracked into "low level classes." They were told the bogyman stories of having to wake up EARLY and MISS CARTOONS, hop on a bus, ride all the way across the city -- BEFORE THE SUN CAME UP -- take their classes with Those People who carried weapons, and ride all the way back, getting home after dark and MISSING THEIR CARTOONS AND LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE!!!! (Guess which parts resounded with me?) 

"Black" became something unrecognizable to even the people labeled "Black," but children raised to believe it as real. I was raised to believe it as real. When I start to pick it apart, in my actions, my scholarship, my point of view, my assumption, the very air that I breathe, language that I use, stories that I tell. I still ask, "am I still that? Am I overcompensating to prove that I am not that?"

At Thanksgiving, my family and I went to the Louisiana Museum of Culture and Life, home of the reviled "Uncle Joe" statue. The museum had a nice exhibit on slavery in the local sugar planting. Our ancestors through my father and his mother -- French Acadians (not Cajun, my M'amie insisted, but that's another, and yes they were) -- were slave holders along this stretch of the river down around the German coast. I'm pretty sure that they were involved in the uprising there -- on the wrong side, of course. We were always the Bad Guys. Anything from St. Gabriel in the museum has some connection to our family. A hearse there took our ancestors from the church to their mausoleums. Theriots, Le Blancs (along with every other person in south Louisiana), Loupe, some vague connection to Landrys, a Mather through marriage. 

My nephew, now in college, was studying the exhibit on slavery. He's a fierce one, with a strong sense of wrong and right. I asked him if he had learned about slavery in his classes. He grew up in Florida and goes to college there, so it's a crap shoot. He said yes. I wanted to tell him about our family as slave holders here, but I wondered what I wanted him to take from that. 

I remembered my dad always thinking that learning about slavery was some political ploy to make White people feel guilty. He changed later in life and became curious, less defensive, wanting to learn. He and my mother wouldn't let me watch Roots when it first aired while I was in 4th grade. They watched it, of course, and my bedroom was positioned adjacent to the living room so that I could either listen through the wall or stand in the hallway and watch through the door with their back to me. My homeroom and social studies teacher, Mrs. McMearn was the only Black teacher in our lily White (and some Hispanic, which I later realized that I classified as White in my head) school. She talked about it in class, and the rest of the students didn't have parents quite so squeamish as mine. This all naturally fueled my interest. I'd beg for details of the plot at recess the way the boys did for details about someone's dad's dirty magazines.

Can you imagine that? Texas parents being liberal on race? (Of course, now that I think about it, the majority of them supported Carter rather than Reagan in 1976, so...what the hell happened?)

When Roots re-aired while I was in 8th grade, I would do my homework in my parents' room while I watched their tiny black and white t.v. I was fascinated to see it -- and the Roots: the Next Generation which aired around that time, I think -- I remember watching it. Anyway, the point was that my father passed through, pointed at the t.v., and said, "you don't need to feel guilty for that." 

"Oh," I said, because I didn't know what else to say. "Ok." I wasn't feeling guilty. I was fascinated, engaged in the story, sympathetic with Kunta Kinte, Fidler, Kizzy, the whole life outside of the Big House that seemed a revelation to me. In fact, guilt never seemed the appropriate word. Guilt is when you do something bad yourself. I've done a lot of racist shit in my life, micro and not so micro aggressions. Said mean things just to be mean. What LBJ said about convincing a poor White man that he's better than a Black man is true. I do feel endlessly guilty for that. Guilt is about your own actions.

Participating in racism is another level. It makes you culpable, complicit, and responsible, sometimes in ways that you didn't even ask for because we are all caught up in these systems larger than ourselves. I have responsibility in this system. The racism was bred in me, it came with the skin and the family history.

I said nothing to my nephew because I wasn't sure what I wanted him to know or what he should do with that information. I didn't know what lesson he should take, or what responsibility he should be aware of. I'm still working through that myself. 

I do know that my next magnum opus will not be about Black people. I now feel that I am trespassing. Sally Hemings taught me so much, but the main thing that she taught me was that her story was not mine to tell. I'm the wrong person. More on that another time. Now, I need to turn the mirror on myself, on people like myself, on the artifacts like the Little Black Sambo book. This project may never get farther than this blog, but so what. I am beholden to no one anymore (certainly not after next May, fingers crossed.)

What does it mean to be White, not rich White, but privileged enough, to be sure? To be a historian? To have been brought up in the South with this history of time, place, family, the things that I gravitated toward for entertainment? Those are part of my Big Question.